Cairo Meets Butterscotch: A Postscript on Hounds

Innocent of our coming contents from week to week as any first-time subscriber—though not as wise, tech-savvy, and admirable as all our subscribers are—I had no idea, when my own account of life with a dog went to press, or into pixels, last week, that we would also have Nicholas Schmidle’s exact, and exacting, account of the killing of bin Laden, and that Butterscotch, our own rather, ahem, non-militarized dog—that may describe her best: Not An Navy Dog—would share the pages of the magazine this week with Cairo, the brave Belgian Malinois who accompanied the SEALs to Abbottabad. (A curious stylistic point: though we are told that Ahmed, the translator introduced immediately before, is a pseudonym, and that all the other SEALs are kept as mere first names, Cairo, one gathers, is really called Cairo, out there in the open. Have we blown his—or is it her—cover?)

But it brought to bear something that I had not been able to fit into the piece, though well worth exploring, and that is the role of the working, or specialized dog, in dog lore and history. Though dogs have always worked, the prime new evolutionary theory of their history, as I explained at doubtless numbing length, is that they insinuated themselves into human circles as scavengers and play objects, and that the usefulness of dogs, their role as working animals, chained to a task, is relatively speaking, new. Where once speculation turned on the prime role of the wolf as an aide in hunting, and then in shepherding, as a prime motive for dog-keeping, we now tend to think that the first role of the wolf-dog was to eat off the floor and play with the kids, just like now. The development of the working dog on this account came later—and indeed, the strict militarization of dogs into neat breeds and kinds, Sporting and Working and so on, is certainly a very recent invention, dating to the middle of the nineteenth century.

From the evolutionary view there’s just this … dog, wandering around villages, but from our modern point of view, there are these dogs. One of the fascinating visual tasks in Paris, from where we have just returned, is to go and look at one of the greatest of all dog-art works, the seventeenth-century tapestries called “The Hunts Of Maximilian” in the Louvre, and try to figure out what breeds exactly the Emperor is taking out hunting with him. They’ve clearly changed greatly over just these few centuries. What we think of as a kind of a “natural kingdom” of dogs with the ones who occupy the lap over here and the ones who salute with the SEALs way over there, really only got made recently—or rather, since some dogs were always on ladies’ laps, and some out in the field, it was the exact naming and strict segregating of them that came later. (Extra bonus points here for anyone who wants to compare the mid-nineteenth-century classification of French wine, which only happened in 1855, with the companion classification of dogs around the same time. In both cases, hint to students, the differences themselves had long been evident—everybody could tell a great Margaux from an O.K. Medoc, as anyone could tell Butterscotch’s grandma from Cairo’s—but the idea of giving these differences precise names and fitting them into fixed categories was all new. Many French philosophers could get books—no, volumes!—from pondering this twin truth.)

We live in the wake of these classifications, in wine and hound alike, and, as naming feeds in a kind of virtuous spiral—call something similar to something else by a different name and you soon start seeing it as a different thing—one of the things I failed to talk about at length in that dog story is that we relate both to our dogs and the breeds our dog belong to. A Havanese’s character and intelligence really does differ from that of, say, a Husky, and though we are, as the dog scientists insist, newly hyper-sensitive to these differences, the differences are obviously not all in our heads. My friend and colleague and fellow-Canadian, Bruce McCall, writes:

It interests me that dog intelligence does seem to span a very wide range. Golden retrievers are dumb as a box of hammers but border collies and Jack Russell’s are so smart. I don’t know how this relates to genetics/environment/training. Watching a trained black Lab, by the way, is something to behold; I knew a guy out in California who raised black Labs strictly for competition and he had those bitches (all female, because females are lighter and more agile in running and fetching) doing everything but figure out his income tax. You stand one of them at the edge of a pond and throw a decoy over to the other side, and the dog instantly computes whether it’s faster to swim or run around the pond. I guess that’s behavioral conditioning, like Marine boot camp. Border collies are fascinating to watch as they herd the sheep; it does take something away to know that the first thing they have to do is un-learn their ancient desire to attack, rip apart, and eat the sheep.

Though we know from evolutionary history that all dogs descend from a common ancestor, and one wolf hovers in their past, it is amazing to see, on an off-leash morning in Central Park, how much difference not just in appearance but in character the hand of man can make. (One feels the same thing, of course, tasting a California pinot and an astringent village Burgundy: people are very, very good at subtle distinctions in the domestication of grape juice and dog juice.)

The other startling and perhaps significant thing to take away from the other dog in the issue, is that, for all that we have heard of its titanium teeth and high-intensity training (making it sound like one of those dogs in “Up,” able to do everything short of flying a helicopter its own sweet self), and readiness to find hidden bodies, the primary role that Cairo played in the actual raid seems to have been symbolic. He closed off the perimeter, stood watch—having a tough-looking dog around was probably a good way to keep passersby at a distance, and impress on them that something vaguely military, a “security operation,” was going on. Police dogs in the subway play the same role; the pistol in the patrolman’s pocket is infinitely more lethal, but the dog at the end of the leash remains far more impressive. Even when they are on covert ops, dogs remain heraldic animals. (One the plane back from Paris, though, we saw a bright-eyed beagle sniffing out something—drugs? bombs?—in passengers’ luggage. The disproportion between the beagle’s jaunty sweetness and his intimidating mission was mildly alarming, like seeing a clown in night-vision goggles.)

Many have written in asking for a photograph of Butterscotch herself, and though no work of mere digital photography can rival a Feiffer drawing for getting at the essence of a thing, I append one above, in case you see her in the park and want to ask for a paw-print on your magazine—or iPad, for that matter.

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